Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Obama’s Non-Doctrine Doctrine

By Clay Risen August 26, 2011 9:30 pmAugust 26, 2011 9:30 pm

The Thread is an in-depth look at how major news and controversies are being debated across the online spectrum.

With the stock market gyrating, the Atlantic churning and D.S.K. walking free, it was easy to miss what some are calling a turning point in American foreign policy: the fall of Libya’s Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Thing is, no one can agree on what exactly that turning point represents.

Even President Obama’s supporters, or at least supporters of the intervention, can’t reach a consensus. To some, it is a vindication of his cautious, realist approach to intervention and proof of an emerging “Obama Doctrine.” Writing at The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky, the Thread’s former boss at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, went so far as to compare him to George Bush Sr.:

Obama has been more in the mold of George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state, Jim Baker, when the Eastern bloc was throwing off Moscow’s shackles. Offer encouragement and stability, give a few speeches about freedom, but otherwise let them do their own work.
…
That’s starting to sound like a doctrine to me. Call it the doctrine of no doctrine: using our power and influence but doing so prudently and multilaterally, with the crucial recognition that Egypt is different from Libya is different from Syria is different from someplace else. According to the foreign-policy establishment, if you want to have a self-respecting big-D doctrine, you’re not supposed to recognize differences. The doctrine must guide all cases. But that is exactly the kind of thinking that has led — always — to tragedy. The Truman Doctrine was never meant to be applied to Vietnam. The Bush Doctrine was applied to Iraq based on a series of lies told to the American people. And so on. If the Obama Doctrine is nothing like those, so much the better.

George Bush Sr.? Try Bill Clinton. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Obama adviser and a member of the liberal interventionist club from the mid-2000s, spoke for many who saw Libya as precisely the sort of effort they had envisioned as an alternative to George W. Bush’s unilateralism — multilateral, values-centered and precise in its aims. In other words, Kosovo:

We also now know how different intervention looks when we help forces who want to be helped. East Timor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Libya — all cases where force evened out odds between a brutal government and a widespread and legitimate social or national movement. It is difficult to know when a state has failed in its responsibility to protect its people, particularly when secession is involved. This is why international authorization is both required and difficult to obtain. But the contrast with Iraq and Afghanistan, where external invasion saw the U.S. often labelled as an enemy, is enormous.

Another clear lesson: the depiction of America as “leading from behind” makes no sense. In a multi-power world with problems that are too great for any state to take on alone, effective leadership must come from the center. Central players mobilize others and create the conditions and coalitions for action — just as President Barack Obama described America’s role in this conflict. In truth, U.S. diplomacy has been adroit in enabling action from other powers in the region, and then knowing when to step out of the way.

As the international community contemplates today what its options are in post-Qaddafi Libya — as well as in places like Syria, where massacres are still ongoing — it would do well to look back instead to the realism of the late 1990s, when international missions were always on the table, but were always also expected to be limited and focused.

To that end, NATO’s role in the Libyan war seems like an encouraging example. The United States defined its role as tipping the balance, supporting, but not controlling, the efforts of local forces rebelling against a cruel regime. NATO adjusted its objectives to developments on the ground, worked for incremental success without raising exaggerated expectations. Wars of this sort, with limited and strictly defined costs, may be the only way to rescue the idea of humanitarian intervention at all; the West should be similarly cautious in the nation-building phase.

So is Barack Obama the heir to Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton? Neither, says Walter Russell Mead of Bard College, writing in The American Interest. Obama is simply carrying out a more nuanced extension of Bush Jr.’s neoconservatism:

The most irritating argument anyone could make in American politics is that President Obama, precisely because he seems so liberal, so vacillating, so nice, is a more effective neoconservative than President Bush. As is often the case, the argument is so irritating partly because it is so true.

President Obama is pushing a democracy agenda in the Middle East that is as aggressive as President Bush’s; he adopts regime change by violence if necessary as a core component of his regional approach and, to put it mildly, he is not afraid to bomb. But where President Bush’s tough guy posture (“Bring ‘Em On!”) alienated opinion abroad and among liberals at home, President Obama’s reluctant warrior stance makes it easier for others to work with him.

Others, however, aren’t so enamored — but, again, they don’t necessarily agree why. Let’s start with the “yes, but” folks: those glad to see the rebels victorious and generally approve of Obama’s strategy, but don’t like calling this anything other than a one-off victory. Take Robert Haddick, the managing editor of Small Wars Journal, who is skeptical about how easy this new doctrine will be to apply elsewhere:

When [Secretary of Defense Leon] Panetta and [the Obama foreign policy adviser Ben] Rhodes argue for the utility of international alliances, the advantages of having indigenous forces leading internal regime change, and the benefits of burden-sharing, they will attract very few sparring partners. If this is what constitutes the ‘Libya Model,’ the model will draw few critics. But since the Libyan revolution is far from over, one would assume the model must also be far from complete. And whatever form it finally takes, it remains to be seen whether its features will transfer to similar crises elsewhere.
…
Obama may wish to replicate this supporting role for the United States during future crises but it is hard to see where else in the world such conditions would reappear. Britain, France, Italy and others in Europe perceived critical interests in the Libyan crisis and pushed for action, which the United States eventually supported. Through the NATO alliance, the United States had long military experience with these countries and could thus quickly establish a workable military operation. However, when significant crises occur, say, around the Persian Gulf or in the Asia-Pacific area and critical U.S. interests are at stake, the United States will be less likely to find allies with the same motivation, the same military capabilities, and with the same combat experience to fight alongside its forces. In these cases, the United States will find itself back in the lead, an arrangement its allies have long become used to and likely prefer.

But if that’s going to be the case, others said, why did we fight this battle with one hand tied behind our back? In a snark-filled letter of congratulations to the Libyan rebels, Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina bashed the president for not bringing more swagger to the game:

The end of the Qaddafi regime in Libya is a victory for the Libyan people and for the broader cause of freedom in the Middle East and throughout the world. This achievement was made possible first and foremost by the struggle and sacrifice of countless Libyans, whose courage and perseverance we applaud. We also commend our British, French, and other allies, as well as our Arab partners, especially Qatar and the U.A.E., for their leadership in this conflict. Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Qaddafi, but we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower.

The National Review’s Stanley Kurtz went even further, warning that the multilateral, U.N.-sanctioned nature of the intervention would send a dangerous signal to America’s would-be adversaries:

So Qaddafi has been toppled, but only after a notably weak and unnecessarily prolonged campaign. If this is what it takes for America and its allies to dislodge an unpopular dictator in open terrain, our more dangerous potential adversaries cannot be feeling much fear right now.
…
United Nations authorization, legal precedents like the controversial Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, and involvement of the International Criminal Court may seem like irrelevant window-dressing amidst all the power politics. Unfortunately, the internationalist agenda of tying down America’s military with U.N.-backed doctrines and law has probably been advanced by this intervention. It’s true that the unexpectedly difficult course of the war may discourage further R2P-style interventions. Should Obama be reelected, however, U.N. rules and principles will likely continue to gain ground, while congressional approval and war fighting under a robust traditional conception of American national-security interests may suffer as a result.

In other words, it’s the 2000s and the fight over the Iraq war, all over again. Jamie Fly of the conservative Foreign Policy Initiative even argues that the intervention proves that American unilateral force is needed now more than ever: “The reality is that Libya is a pyrrhic victory for the Obama administration. If anything, the past five months have only served to underscore the necessity of robust American leadership in world affairs, and presidential leadership at home. Both were sorely lacking in the case of Libya.”

But there are also those who are less keen on the whole affair. On the left, Robert Fisk of The Independent wonders whether the limited intervention nevertheless leaves the rebels dependent on the West, with Libya set to become yet another neo-colonial cesspool:

But, of course, the massive presence of Western diplomats, oil-mogul representatives, highly paid Western mercenaries and shady British and French servicemen — all pretending to be “advisers” rather than participants — is the Benghazi Green Zone. There may (yet) be no walls around them but they are, in effect, governing Libya through the various Libyan heroes and scallywags who have set themselves up as local political masters. We can overlook the latters’ murder of their own commanding officer — for some reason, no one mentions the name of Abdul Fatah Younes any more, though he was liquidated in Benghazi only a month ago — but they can only survive by clinging to our Western umbilicals.

And then there are the folks at Cato, Reason and other libertarian outlets, who worry that Obama’s unilateral decision to engage in a successful multilateral intervention will leave the door open to even more aggressive and bloody forays by future presidents, who might not be so willing to check their own power. As Matt Welch, Reason’s editor in chief, wrote on his magazine’s Web site:

Today’s Team Blue dethroning of a tinpot dictator lowers the bar for tomorrow’s Team Red assault on Iran, which of course will be confirmation that when it comes to the Constitution, President Perry (should he wrest the nomination from the more deserving Texan) is worse than Nixon and Hitler combined. Team Blue will once again regain the White House on an “anti-dumb war” campaign; a scattering of Republicans will then exhume their deference to the War Powers Act, and the U.S. share of global responsibility and military spending will continue its inexorable climb toward 100 percent. This is why some people refer to the bipartisan political class as “The War Party,” and with plenty of justification.
…
I’m happy to see Qaddafi on the run, but I’d be happier still if A) it had been accomplished and owned by the oppressed people of Libya themselves (which would have been less than easy, to say the least), B) if the action didn’t require breaking U.S. law and lowering the intervention bar even further; and C) if the trend line in U.S. foreign policy dominance and spending wasn’t continuing to drive us toward imperial bankruptcy.

Some argued that Obama was wrong to intervene against a country that, if not an ally, was at least a non-threat. The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison wrote: “Starting a war against a government that had abandoned unconventional weapons and terrorism in exchange for normal relations makes even less sense. For over 150 days, the U.S. and our allies have bombed a country whose government and people had done nothing to any of us for a very long time.”

There is considerable reason to believe that a post-Qaddafi Libya will be worse for the United States than Qaddafi’s Libya. Most of us think that the objective of the War on Terror is to eradicate al-Qaeda’s capacity to project power, and therefore we are resistant to strategies that have potential to empower al-Qaeda and its sympathizers. And while it now provokes snickers to suggest that Qaddafi’s Libya was better for us than other foreseeable alternatives, that conceit actually was U.S. policy from 2003 through early 2011, under both Bush and Obama.

Of course, all of this conversation has to be qualified heavily: the rebels may have captured Tripoli, but they don’t have Qaddafi, let alone control over the country. And while things could move quickly toward a transitional government and a stable political situation, it could also degrade into more bloodshed — at which point Obama will have to decide whether his newborn doctrine requires, or even allows for, boots on the ground.

For now, as the Wilson Center’s Aaron David Miller told Politico, it’s hard to argue with success. “I don’t think this is the time to say to the president, ‘You’re a genius,’ but it is a time for those Obama haters to admit the guy made the right call under a tough set of circumstances.”

Peter Catapano is on vacation.

What's Next

The Thread is an in-depth look at how the major news events and controversies of the day are being viewed and debated across the online spectrum. Compiled by Peter Catapano, an editor in The Times’s Opinion section, the Thread is published every Saturday in response to breaking news.